According to a message from the Shia Islamist movement, which controls a large part of Yemen, "a number" of drones were directed at Jaffa in Tel Aviv. There, the attack is said to have been successful and the drones are said to have reached their targets without being shot down.
Israel has briefly mentioned a "suspected flying object" that the military stopped outside Israel's coast during the night, without going into further detail.
On Saturday, the Houthi movement fired a projectile at Tel Aviv airport in connection with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's scheduled landing there. The next day, Israeli bomber planes attacked several locations in Yemen.
On Wednesday, the Houthi movement said it had fired several cruise missiles at Israel, a day after allied Iran carried out a comprehensive attack. It was not clear how the missiles fared and the attack was not reported by other parties.
The Houthi movement is allied with both Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. During the Gaza War, it has fired at Israel from Yemen on several occasions and attacked ships in the waters off Yemen when they were deemed to have some kind of Israeli connection.
Israel has tightened censorship in the country during the war and prohibited media from reporting, for example, damage to strategically important infrastructure and details about the advanced air defense.
The Houthi movement – which officially calls itself Ansar Allah (approximately God's followers) – has controlled a large part of war-torn Yemen for over a decade.
The Shia Islamist movement emerged from the Zaidi clan al-Huthi, which has had a historical ruling role in northwestern Yemen. It was forged in its current form in opposition to Yemen's participation in the US war on terror in the 2000s, after which it radicalized and began waging guerrilla warfare.
Its forces struck in conjunction with the Arab Spring and went to war with Yemen's internationally recognized government, which was already shaken by popular protests and southern separatists. Since 2015, the capital Sanaa has been under Houthi control.
In the enormously bloody war that is still ongoing – with hundreds of thousands of dead and widespread famine – Iran and Iran-backed militias in the region have backed the Houthi movement, while Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia has assembled a coalition in support of the internationally recognized government.
